2008-06-11

This American $152,000

I listen to the This American Life podcast each week and the program has recently started asking for donations to cover their bandwidth costs of $152,000 a year. It seems like a waste of money when things like bittorrent and Amazon S3 exist in the world. I guess they opted for good and fast from their list of three options.

How much time would an employee have to spend to set up and maintain the system, so perhaps 1% of listeners could use it instead of the normal system (which is all that things like iTunes support)? BitTorrent would be a money loser.

They have a big archive too, no? BitTorrent doesn't seem to work well for that. They'd have to seed, and their seeds might be the only source of the content for lots of shows.